The other (with an anticipatory smile): “You know it’s not a happy ending ahead.”

Now ”menacing” has never been the first word I think of in association with Arthur Miller. (Isn’t that reserved for Harold Pinter?) But those two middle-aged audience members weren’t off-base in describing the tone of the acclaimed London revival of Miller’s “All My Sons.” As directed by Howard Davies, and starring David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker, this production is as clouded by inexorable doom as anything out of an ancient Athens amphitheater.

Don’t panic, lovers of naturalism. This isn’t a stylized, ritualized version in the manner of Simon McBurney’s Broadway revival of 2008. There’s nothing remotely abstract about William Dudley’s American backyard set. (When a felled tree needs to be removed, a character takes a real saw to it.)

But the performances all have a heightened solemnity, punctuated by roof-rattling anguish, that would be just as suitable to Greek tragedy straight up. When, towards the end, Ms. Wanamaker erupted into a rising, guttural keen of lamentation, I immediately thought of her interpretation of Electra some years ago.

The Britons pride themselves on having always taken Miller very seriously, regarding him as their personal “prophet without honor in his own country” during the period he fell out of fashion in the U.S. Perhaps it’s partly because Miller is now being regularly staged on Broadway again that West End productions like this one have such a pious, almost competitive intensity. It’s as if every scene here, including the lighter ones of jokey conversation, were performed under a marble arch inscribed: “This is important. This is Truth.”

Such an approach tends to bring out the Sardou as much as the Sophocles in Miller. And I still prefer Mr. Davies’s 2001 production of “All My Sons” for the National Theater, which starred a superb Julie Walters and seemed to exist unconditionally in real life and real time, or for that matter, Gregory Mosher’s recent Broadway revival of Miller’s “View From the Bridge,” in which doom crept with stealth through everyday life.

But there’s no denying the effectiveness of Mr. Davies’s less subtle “All My Sons,” or, I might argue, its appropriateness to the times. In retelling Miller’s story of a family tainted by the blood of World War II American airmen killed in planes with defective parts, this version makes sure that the head of the factory that made those parts (Mr. Suchet) and his wife (Ms. Wanamaker) look as guilty as sin from the get-go. (It’s hard to believe that their virtuous son, though beautifully played by Stephen Campbell Moore, would continue to trust in their innocence.)

Most productions of “All My Sons” that I’ve seen present this couple as a study in mutually dependent denial, doing their best (and often succeeding) in keeping accusatory ghosts at bay. Here, portrayed with electrifying duplicity by Mr. Suchet and Ms. Wanamaker, they’re more like the Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth of Middle America – guarded, watchful and consciously poisoned by their own corruption. Later, having dinner at the Wolseley, I ran into a Scottish novelist who told me this production “made me understand Halliburton.” And I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in the theater thinking of recent crimes against nature by certain global oil companies.

But though I had cried copiously in the last scenes of Mr. Davies’s “All My Sons” for the National, I left this one dry-eyed. Let me add that I was probably in the minority in that respect. Just before the curtain came down, the air was rent by the loudest, most convulsive sobs I have ever heard from within a theater audience. When I looked behind me, I saw a business-suited man the size of a linebacker, his head buried in his hands, being comforted by a petite blonde woman. My date for the show, who is as much in love with theater as I am, said of the sobbing giant, “That’s rather heartening, isn’t it?” I knew what she meant.